The Accidental Environmentalist

One late evening in March, Shigeru Ban, dressed as always in black, left his office, a large recycled-paper tube structure about the size of a subway car temporarily wedged onto the top floor of the Pompidou Center in Paris. Mimicking the shape of the glass escalator tubes on the building’s outside, the office blends imperceptibly enough into the architecture that nobody on staff at Georges, the trendy rooftop restaurant with a big glass window facing Ban’s studio, even knew it was there.

Called the Paper Tube Studio, it feels, inside, a little like a zeppelin, with porthole windows and simple white curtains for dividers. A dozen or so assistants sat at plain sawhorse tables silently gazing into computers or constructing models, working on Ban’s various projects: a housing complex in Dijon; the headquarters for a cosmetics company in Parma; a luxury villa in the Caribbean; and the Pompidou’s satellite museum in Metz, the commission for which explains what Ban’s office is doing on the roof of the Pompidou in Paris. Elsa Neufrille, a slender young woman in Converse sneakers with a mop of dark hair, who oversaw the studio’s construction by a volunteer crew of Ban’s students, slugged water from a Contrex bottle and contemplated a paper bridge Ban is designing for Avignon. She nodded as he left. He nodded back.

Taking the elevator down, Ban led me several blocks through a light spring rain to a small, smoky restaurant crowded with students, then half-listened as a Japanese friend of his translated the chalkboard menu. After some years here, he still hasn’t seemed to master French. He hasn’t had much time. Every two weeks, he leaves for Tokyo to spend several days teaching and checking in at his office there, where he oversees a different set of projects, including the last stage of a large office building for Swatch on the main shopping street in Ginza (it opens this week). Every month he flies to New York, where he has another office. With his New York partner, Dean Maltz, Ban is designing a condominium tower next to Frank Gehry’s new IAC headquarters building beside the West Side Highway in Manhattan.

Judith Turner, an architectural photographer who has known Ban for years, told me that Ban used to live on Russian time because it was easier than readjusting his body clock. By now he’s accustomed to the nomad’s life — it goes with architectural stardom, which, at 49, still young in the profession, he has acquired not least for projects of a sustainable or green variety. Ban isn’t comfortable with the word “green,” which he finds vague, not to mention fashionable, although his projects are often described as such. These include the (fittingly named) Nomadic Museum.

Made out of cargo containers, stacked in a grid like a giant children’s toy block set, the museum is a temporary structure that can be put together almost anywhere, shipping containers being ubiquitous, and as easily taken apart. A Nomadic Museum took over Pier 54 in Manhattan a couple of years ago. The latest and largest version, with 153 blue, gray, red, orange and green containers, many stenciled with COSTCO in big white capital letters, now squats on reclaimed landfill near the port in Tokyo. Peaked colonnades of recycled paper tubes create the equivalent of twin church naves inside, where immense hanging curtains, like banners of exquisite Indian silk, decorate the entrance and exit. They’re made from recycled tea bags.

Ban’s interest in simple, easily transported, reusable materials surfaced in another project that made him famous and particularly admired. In a field where humanitarian relief work isn’t exactly commonplace, Ban devised shelters for refugees in Rwanda made of slender paper tubes. This led him to do temporary housing — log cabins with paper-tube walls for disaster victims — first in response to the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, where he also built a paper church, and later in Turkey and India. Having put up some of the money himself, he persuaded local companies to donate materials. In Kobe, he used yellow plastic Kirin beer crates filled with sandbags as foundations. The average cost per house was $2,000, though it is the elegance as much as the economy of the architecture that has distinguished Ban. His works are airy, curvaceous, balletic. An heir to Buckminster Fuller and Oscar Niemeyer, to Japanese traditional architecture and to Alvar Aalto, he is an old-school Modernist with a poet’s touch and an engineer’s inventiveness.

If his works seem to be split between two very different sorts of endeavors, luxury and temporary, they’re actually of a piece, the through-line a kind of minimal leanness. It’s an aesthetic and also a strategy — to make the most out of whatever is available. This means using shipping containers but also turning bookshelves into supporting walls and devising barrel-vaulted ceilings out of recycled plywood. Ban is resourceful and thrifty, whether he’s building a glass villa for a fashion-company executive in a suburb outside Tokyo or a paper-tube house in India.

“Every architect talks about sustainable design now,” Ban said to me over clattering dinner dishes at the restaurant, “but it’s hard to define. Solar panels, for example, are interesting, but they lack durability, which can make them costlier than electricity, and the panels require lots of energy to make, then lots more to recycle.

“Anything can be recycled except maybe concrete,” he continued. For Ban, green or sustainable architecture is therefore about more than saving energy or using recycled materials. It’s about people’s emotional connection to the buildings they occupy, and about making buildings that may have different identities at different times. Some buildings, he says, should be built as disposable. They can still be green so long as they don’t require more energy to take down than they did to put up.

To the objection that paper buildings are wasteful or too fragile, Ban has a ready response: “A concrete-and-steel building can be temporary. It can be taken down or destroyed by an earthquake. But paper can last. It’s a question of love. My paper church was still around after 10 years. If a building is loved, it becomes permanent, although buildings don’t always need to be permanent. People are more nomadic today. Factories move to find cheap labor. People don’t go to offices the way they used to. Families grow, they need to move, then children leave, and they move again. It’s always about designing for the particular situation.”

In a proposal for a museum and condominium tower in Southern California, Ban told me, he exploited natural light and ventilation so as to rely less on air-conditioning. At the same time, he realized that a tall building next to the museum would block the sun part of the day. Ban saw this not just as a problem but also as an opportunity. Calculating how the sun moved, he shaped the tower with a kind of ski-slope facade and glass handrails on the balconies to reflect light down into the museum. “I never start with an arbitrary shape,” Ban told me. “I always start with the problem.”

When I went in April to meet Ban in Tokyo, a young Japanese woman nodded at the mention of his name then asked me in all seriousness whether it was true, as she had heard, that he had been the model for the cartoon character Super Mario. I winced but knew what she meant. Ban has black hair and a black mustache and a soft face. He is a deeply serious, strong-willed man with a wry sense of humor that can take awhile to reveal itself. “He has a silly side, but the one word that would sum him up is ‘chutzpah,’ ” says Laurie Hawkinson, the New York architect who is an old friend of Ban’s from their student days at Cooper Union in the 1980s. She laughs.

“I mean he’s forceful and incredibly persistent,” she adds. “He got into the relief work by calling up the United Nations and just not taking no for an answer. He’s different from other high-design architects who don’t get into the mud. He’s on a different track generally. Architects today talk about surface, articulation, skin, glazing, and he deals with all those issues, of course. But the trajectory of his career is through structural engineering, so that’s how he approaches all problems, including sustainability.”

I went one morning to see a feat of engineering by Ban, his library for Seikei University, in the west of Tokyo. It shares a grassy quadrangle on campus with several plain brick buildings. From the outside, the library, with its alternating bands of glass and brick, fits unexceptionally into the Beaux-Arts milieu, but inside is another universe. Cantilevered stacks for books seem to float. A huge glass wall opens onto a grove of zelkova trees. Timber beams of recycled strandboard arch over an atrium of flying bridges and immense, mushroom-shaped pods that rise from a sunken floor. It’s a cross between Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building, with a spiral glass staircase, mimicking the one at Niemeyer’s foreign ministry in BrasÃlia, that underscores the otherworldly, quasi-nautical motif.

Photo

Maison E, a 12,900-square-foot palace of white and glass outside Tokyo.Credit
Nikolas Koenig for The New York Times

With Niemeyer, curvy, fantastical shapes have come from pushing materials like reinforced concrete to new limits and not incidentally from the desire to make architecture for the masses. Niemeyer put the samba in Le Corbusier and Mies. You might say Ban is trying to do something similar, only with manga.

Mayu Inoue, who works for Ban in Tokyo, met me that morning under one of the library’s pods and told me that his office wasn’t far away. We started walking, then boarded a train, then another. Not quite an hour later we debarked on the outskirts of the city. The familiar crowds, office towers and traffic gave way to an older Japan, a cluster of hilly lanes and shops in modest two-story buildings with few cars and no sidewalks, petering out into streets of private houses. This is near to where Ban grew up. He lives and works here now. His office occupies a storefront across from a rice merchant, next to an old hardware store. Ban’s mother’s workshop is upstairs. She designs custom women’s clothing and runs Atelier Ban, a tiny boutique at the corner.

From the town center, through a leafy residential stretch, we reached the apartment building where Ban lives, in Hanegi Forest, which is not so much a forest as a patch of slender trees surrounded by houses. A decade ago, Ban designed the place: it has 11 triplexes, with a sleek, white exterior, raised, like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoie, on slender columns, or pilotis. He didn’t cut or move a single tree. Replacing the usual steel-frame grid with a triangular grid system, he was able to remove beams and make way for trees to grow through gaps he designed in the building.

The place looked a tad dingy in the way that aging white buildings sometimes do, and the dirt forest floor, interrupted by pilotis, felt less weightless and open than dark, but it wasn’t a sunny day, and clearly the layout was ingenious in its incorporation of nature. In the way Ban’s work often does, the architecture replaced typically cramped Japanese conditions with lofty, modern spaces. On my way back into town, I noticed just how much unlike everything else in the neighborhood it was — nearly as startling as the library.

Ban’s mother was in the store when we passed. Mayu waved. Ban told me that as a boy, he “loved watching the women who sewed for my mother. She used to go to Paris every year to see the shows,” he added. “She would come back with souvenirs. I envied her. I wanted to go abroad.”

It was his mother who paid for him to study architecture at Cooper Union in New York. His father, a businessman working for Toyota, thought the name didn’t sound like a proper university. “He doesn’t like to take any risks,” Ban told me.

In high school Ban studied design after class. Weekly projects in wood, paper and bamboo piqued his interest in materials and construction. A classmate was the daughter of Kiyoshi Ikebe, the architect, a disciple of Corbu’s. Ban realized, looking back years later, that Ikebe had shaped his way of thinking. In 1975 he came across an architecture magazine dedicated to John Hejduk.

“His works shocked me,” he recalled about Hejduk, a former Cooper Union dean whose brightly colored exercises with cubes, grids and diagonals mixed functionalism with a savvy kind of childlike ebullience. “They looked like toys, with simple colors and geometry, totally different from what I saw in Tokyo.” It would lead him to consider ways to merge East and West: “I decided I had to go to Cooper Union. So I studied English for three months. Then when I arrived in the United States I learned that I couldn’t go to Cooper yet, so I visited a few schools in California and enrolled at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture. It was a terrific experience because we had case studies, which included Raymond Kappe and Wright and Neutra, who mixed Modernism with Japanese influences. Then when I did enroll at Cooper, I learned history: Corbu, Mies, Palladio, Schinkel. I started with Hejduk’s geometry, and Mies and Corbu became my gods.”

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Not everyone at Cooper did. Peter Eisenman, one of his teachers, “hated me and called me Sugar Bear because he said my name was too complicated to pronounce.” Ban, who speaks in a quiet, steady, matter-of-fact way, sometimes pauses when he wants to emphasize a point. “About five years ago I saw him by chance; we were seated at the same table at an award ceremony in Berlin, and he told his little boy to call me Sugar Bear,” Ban said. He paused, then smiled.

Ban took a year off in 1982 and worked in the Tokyo office of the famous Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, then graduated in 1984. While with Isozaki, he started curating shows at the Axis gallery in Tokyo. When he opened his own practice in 1985, he did a show about Emilio Ambasz. Ban came up with honeycombed paper panels, used like Japanese folding screens, as display units. “I learned a great deal from Ambasz,” he told me, recalling a design Ambasz proposed for the Seville Expo in 1992, which celebrated Christopher Columbus (it was never built). The site was near a river. The plan entailed piers and a new manmade lake with pavilions on ships docked at the piers; nations would design their own ships. After the expo, the ships would return to the countries that made them and Seville would be left with a lake and park. For Ban, it was (though he wouldn’t have put it this way then) a thrifty, green idea.

He followed the Ambasz show with one borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art in New York about Alvar Aalto. The Finnish master of organic, undulating Modernism, Aalto was grounded in Nordic culture. He experimented with and reimagined basic materials like brick, glass and wood; he pioneered designs in bentwood furniture, and he planned communities of A-frame houses. “As a student,” Ban said, “I didn’t understand Aalto, but I went to Finland after school and was astonished. The real buildings were so different from what I saw in books. The context was crucial. International architects taught that local materials didn’t matter. But I saw that was not true.” For the Axis show, Ban didn’t have the budget to use wood, which he thought would have been wasteful anyway, so he made partition walls, S-shaped in the vein of Aalto’s bentwood designs, from cheap, recycled paper tubes (“they were much stronger than I expected paper to be, which got me thinking,” he said), and the tubes also functioned as supports for display stands. He reprised this same design for “Alvar Aalto Through the Eyes of Shigeru Ban,” a show at the Barbican Art Gallery in London this spring, which also included his own works. There it was clear how much Ban’s designs owed to Aalto’s, aesthetically, materially, ethically — to what Ban calls “Aalto’s compassionate approach to architecture.”

Ban’s first Aalto exhibition was the beginning of what came to be called his “paper architecture.” After that, he experimented with various paper-tube designs. The engineering fascinated him. Meanwhile, friends commissioned houses — paper and otherwise (“they didn’t know I had no working experience,” he said). For the library of a poet outside Tokyo, he devised a gate-shaped paper-tube frame, with bookshelves as supporting walls. He looked at new ways of using other materials too. In the PC Pile House, near Mount Fuji, he exposed precast concrete piles as supports for a glass pavilion that floated from the side of a steep hill. “I always try to understand and reinterpret the fundamental meaning of each element,” he said. “In that case I like that there’s nothing hidden. Each element has its own clear function.”

Mies’s Farnsworth House became a model. Ban thought it dovetailed with traditional Japanese houses that used translucent shoji screens to expose and enclose space; but Mies used glass walls that were immobile. Ban came up with the Curtain Wall House — a cheeky, steel-frame structure with a two-story deck that juts over the sidewalk like the prow of a ship. A white sliding curtain, 20 or so feet high, could be pulled to enclose the interior. It was the building’s theatrical flourish, the whole design, albeit minimal, like a stage set.

The Curtain Wall House was picked for a 1999 show at MoMA, which earned Ban attention, as did the paper-tube arch that he then devised for the museum’s sculpture garden. It was around this same time that Ban collaborated with Frei Otto on the Japan Pavilion at the Hanover Expo in 2000. “My dream had always been to work with Otto,” Ban recalled of the German architect and engineer. “The expo’s theme was the environment, so our goal became to recycle or reuse all our materials and to keep everything as low-tech as possible.” They came up with an all-paper tube structure, but German authorities, having never seen such a thing before, insisted it be paper and wood. What resulted was a broad, soaring, wavy roof, 242 feet long, 82 feet wide, 52 feet high. It was a paper tube shell held in place by cables like the strings of a tennis racquet. Ban expanded on this idea when he devised a roof for a gymnasium in Odate, in northeast Japan (a graceful, elliptical space inspired by Bernini). For a park in St. Louis, he overcame bamboo’s inherent structural flaws to conceive a latticework pavilion of laminated bamboo, a kind of undulating canopy that reinforced itself like the folded end of a cardboard box. It’s related to his proposal for the Pompidou in Metz (the roof resembles a Chinese hat).

Photo

The Paper Art Museum in Mishima, Shizuoka, glass and steel connected by a membrane of a roof. The shuttered-glass side walls of its three floors open to the outside.Credit
Photographs by Nikolas Koenig for The New York Times

He also takes much of the credit for the latticework design that Think Design, a team of architects of which Ban was a part, proposed in 2003 to replace the World Trade Center towers. The idea was for steel lattices straddling the footprints of the fallen towers. It was poetic, a ladder to the sky. Ban says he was thinking about the Japanese tradition of paper boxes with candles, set afloat as memorials to heal the dead. He measured how light from the towers would cast onto the Hudson River at night. “I was very happy we came in second at ground zero,” he told me. “Because ultimately I knew it would be a political mess.”

Meanwhile Ban was, as his friend Laurie Hawkinson put it, getting into the mud. In 1994, he saw photographs of the refugee camps in Rwanda: two million people in miserable shelters. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees supplied them with plastic sheets and aluminum poles to prop up the sheets. The aluminum replaced trees, which the refugees had been told to cut down but were also using for firewood. Deforestation was causing floods. The refugees simply sold the aluminum and cut down more trees. Ban proposed a paper-tube structure.

“I had no experience with this sort of problem, but I went to Rwanda and went to see the high commissioner,” he told me. “My timing was good. Many companies had been trying to sell him their products, to make money. With my proposal, the tubes could be made cheaply and simply and by the people on site, if they got a little training with equipment that even Rwanda had.”

When the Kobe earthquake hit in 1995, Ban proposed temporary but more elaborate housing out of paper, and his paper church. He was met with skepticism. “The priest didn’t believe me,” Ban said. “So I went to service every week. Finally he said O.K., if I raised the money. At the same time, I was going to the park in Kobe where Vietnamese refugees, who had lost their homes in the quake, were living in a kind of shantytown. It was horrible, but they didn’t want to move to government housing outside the city because then they couldn’t get to their jobs back in town. I built the first temporary house at my own expense. The priest saw it and then he gave me money for more houses but still not for his own church. We built 28 of them.” Ban, of course, also eventually built the church. It stood for 10 years and was re-erected in Taiwan this spring.

Waterproof sponge tape filled gaps between the paper tubes. Canvas roofs gave shade from the heat. Like the Rwandan shelters, the houses, akin to erector sets, could be assembled by anyone. When western Turkey was hit by its own quake, Ban adapted the log-cabin scheme. He persuaded a Japanese corporation to donate plastic sheeting with the company logo on it, good publicity for when the shelters were shown on television. Local Turkish companies donated the beer crates and paper tubes. A Turkish architect warned him that Turkish people accustomed to masonry houses wouldn’t be open to paper ones. “But the reaction was fascinating,” Ban said. “People said they felt more comfortable in the paper houses because the concrete and brick houses had collapsed and people were killed in their sleep. The paper houses wouldn’t fall on them in the middle of the night.”

In Sri Lanka, he changed the log-cabin design to mud-cement brick houses with wood furniture walls. They included rooms that opened onto the street, so that people could continue running their businesses out of the fronts of their homes; he divided interiors so that, as religious Muslims, the women could disappear when their husbands had male visitors.

“And in India, I used woven cane mats for the roofs, because they were there, and because there were no beer crates we used mud floors with broken brick and the concrete from destroyed buildings,” Ban went on to say. “Fortunately, the local industry was textiles, and of course textiles are wrapped around paper tubes.

“There is no border between these projects and my other projects,” he continued. “I am always interested in developing new structural or material systems and adapting them to particular circumstances. That’s what new architecture always comes out of. Otherwise it’s just style and fashion. High-tech buildings, all these acrobatic buildings today, use overdesigned materials and methods. My impulse is always to simplify, clarify.”

Before I left Tokyo, I stopped by to see Noriko Togo, who commissioned Ban to design a low-rise, multiuse building. Togo is an art dealer with a warren of a gallery on the ground floor, full of Picassos. Ban devised for it an ingenious system of sliding walls that hide floating shelves. There are two floor-through apartments upstairs. The building is a three-story glass cube that Ban calls Ivy Structure 2. Togo rolled her eyes when I inquired about the ivy. “It didn’t work out, and Shigeru proposed covering the walls with artificial ivy instead, but I said no, I’m an art dealer, I don’t deal in fakes.” Turned diagonally to the street, the building has triangular gaps that provide space for small gardens and balconies.

Well coiffed, in a business suit, Togo removed her shoes to show me the apartments: lofty, open spaces where trees planted on the terraces screened huge picture windows. “I love this because when I’m inside I feel outside,” she said. “It’s a modern interpretation of a Japanese way of thinking. Without nature, life is not sustainable, we believe. We write poems about that. Buddhist monks live in the mountains where they can open the door and let the wind whistle in. Ban does the same here in a way that’s extremely practical.”

That philosophy has guided other projects like the Paper Art Museum, two elegant glass-and-steel boxes linked by a thin glass membrane of a roof, the walls made of shuttered glass and opening to the outdoors. In the new Swatch tower, a similar device raises the whole facade and rear, transforming the tall first floor of the building into a through street with planted trees and a planted wall inside. At the Naked House, in the middle of a rice field, walls also slide open. Everything is flexible. Inside, four huge boxes on casters, open on two sides, function as movable rooms with tatami mat floors. They can be pushed together or hooked up to air-conditioners or shoved to face the windows.

It’s “very Japanese,” Ban told me, “because the clients didn’t care about privacy.” I was reminded that there is no Japanese word for privacy. I found the apotheosis of this transparent approach in Ban’s most recent and most extravagant house, Maison E, two hours north by train along the coast from Tokyo, through rice paddies and shopping malls. Home to the owner of a fashion company, it’s a $5 million, 12,900-square-foot palace, with a swimming pool, bamboo garden, rock garden, moss garden, all inside a complex of spaces that open onto one another, with sliding glass walls, uniting nature and architecture, private and shared space.

All white and glass, softened by plantings and wood shutters and subtle geometries, it looked immaculate. When I was there, several employees in matching turquoise uniforms were vacuuming, clearly a Sisyphean task. A golf driving range on the second floor mitigated the aesthetic somewhat and stressed a conspicuous consumption that was partly redeemed by a housing complex next door. The fashion company’s owner commissioned Ban to design it for the company’s female workers — an apartment building with breezy studios and large communal spaces to cook and watch television. Call it a socialist Hanegi Forest.

It felt a long way from the paper-tube log cabins, but also not. Ban returns to the same principles in all his work. Asked once what he had learned from Aalto, he said, “to give comfort to people.”

“Architects create monuments to their egos or to help developers,” he went on. “That’s part of what we do, and what I do — make monuments. But they need to work more in the service of society. That’s also the responsibility of the architect. I think we’re responsible at all stages of the process.”

Correction: June 3, 2007

An article on May 20 about the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban misstated the word stenciled on crates that are part of an exhibit in his Nomadic Museum. It is Cosco, an acronym for the China Ocean Shipping Group Company, not Costco, the American warehouse store.